Great to visit our former student Joseph Calandrino at the Federal Trade Commission in DC, where he is now a Research Director.

Denis Nekipelov and I gave a joint talk there about using secure multi-party computation techniques to enable data analyses across sensitive, divided data sets in the room where the FTC commissioners meet.

For the Symposium, I presented a tutorial introduction to secure multi-party computation (focused towards systems researchers), and an invited talk on Memory for Data-Oblivious Computation. Was a special honor to be able to speak about MPC applications build using Yao’s protocol following Andrew Yao’s opening keynote.

Dr. Samee Zahur, PhD 2016
Dissertation: Demystifying Secure Computation: Familiar Abstractions for Efficient Protocols
Dr. Zahur will be joining Google, and working in the group that works on secure computation (broadly) led by SRG alumnus Jonathan McCune.

Hao Bai, BSCS 2016
Thesis project: Mitigating Memory Trace Side-Channels through Cache Loading
Hao will be starting graduate school at Harvard University in the fall.

Ziqi Liu, Distinguished Major with High Distinction in Computer Science (BACS) 2016
DMP project: A Proxy for Mitigating Threats from Embedded Third-party Scripts
Ziqi will be joining Microsoft (Redmond).

We heard we could find some of the world’s best hackers in Germany. So we headed for Berlin. Just off a trendy street and through this alley we rang the bell at the door of a former factory. That’s where we met Karsten Nohl, a German hacker, with a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Virginia.

Karsten demonstrated to the reporter how to track a Congressman’s location and listen in on phone conversations using SS7 vulnerabilities (for a real Congressman, Ted Liu of California, who actually has a CS degree). With permission, of course!

We wanted to see whether Nohl’s group could actually do what they claimed — so we sent an off-the-shelf iPhone from 60 Minutes in New York to Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from California. He has a computer science degree from Stanford and is a member of the House committee that oversees information technology. He agreed to use our phone to talk to his staff knowing they would be hacked and they were. All we gave Nohl, was the number of the 60 Minutes iPhone that we lent the congressman.

Karsten Nohl (PhD 2009) presented his work (with Fabian Bräunlein and Philipp Maier) on vulnerabilities in payment protocols (the ones studied are widely used in Germany but not in other countries) at the Chaos Communications Congress on December 27.

The work has been widely covered in the press recently. Here are a few sample articles:

Now let’s look at Poseidon: a crook can buy a Poseidon payment terminal from the internet, and configure it to pretend to be a particular merchant’s systems. To do this, you need three bits of information, which are trivial to obtain…. Now you can perform arbitrary refunds, drawing money from the store’s funds. As there is no interruption to a merchant’s service, the seller will be none the wiser until he or she audits their finances. … German banks have shrugged off their research as merely “theoretical.”

A top cyber security researcher has warned German banks that their retail payment systems have security flaws that could allow fraudsters to steal payment card PIN codes, create fake cards or siphon funds from customer or merchant accounts.
Karsten Nohl, who is credited with revealing major security threats in mobile phones, automobiles, security cards and thumb-sized USB drives, told Reuters he has found critical weaknesses in software that runs retail point-of-sale terminals in Germany.

During our continuous monitoring for a 24-hour period from November 11, 2015 to November 12, 2015, eight days after the initial discovery, the Chuxiong Archives website consistently presented malicious content injected by an attacker depending on the source IP and user agent. We believe that if a user were to visit the compromised website a second time following the initial exposure to the malicious code, the site would recognize the source IP and user-agent and simply remain dormant, not exhibiting any malicious behavior. Because of this anti-analysis/evasion technique, it may easily cause the belief that a website no longer poses a threat, when it remains infected.

At the time of this report, using our malicious web content scanning system, we have already discovered more than four thousands additional, similarly compromised websites globally exhibiting the same ability of being able to be dormant or active depending on source IP and user agent. Investigations regarding this campaign on a larger scale are ongoing and a second report detailing the similarly compromised websites will be published in the near future.

Felt, 29, who earned a computer science degree from the University of Virginia in 2008, leads the usable security team at Google working on the popular Internet browser.

…

Taking Evans’ offer for a research project was a turning point in Felt’s life, showing her something she liked that she could do well.

“It turned out that I really loved it,” she said. “I like working in privacy and security because I enjoy helping people control their digital experiences. I think of it as, ‘I’m professionally paranoid so that other people don’t need to be.’”

One of the things we’re building is a PayPal competitor–with a modest target of having a few hundred million customers. Everything in India is always on a massive scale. If you could get rid of PayPal passwords, and instead just have a fingerprint–if you could pay for goods at a store with just your fingerprint, that would simplify people’s lives a lot. It would also have the secondary effect of saving some of the security problems, like phishing, that we currently encounter. And this government database is a huge enabler.

If we already have a mandate to collect everybody’s fingerprints, why not use it in the customer’s benefit? The privacy risk is always there. That’s the law and I can’t argue with that. But if the law is already creating this risk, why not create opportunity in the same step?